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However, very little
attention has been paid so far to the specific question of why the Labour Right
has been so vocal on this issue in particular. This is a
crucial issue and thinking about it carefully can shed considerable light on
the current state of Labour Party politics.

So why has antisemitism become
the issue around which the anti-Corbyn elements of Labour have converged so
determinedly? The initial thing to understand is that the Labour right is
composed of two distinct traditions, whose main organisers are currently
committed to co-operating with each other, but who actually have very little in
common. These two groups - the ‘Blairites’ and the traditional Labour right
rooted in the Labour bureaucracy - have their own distinctive reasons for
wanting to promote the idea that the radical left is inherently anti-Semitic.

The Blairites

The notorious Blairites, organised mainly by Progress,
have a negligible organisational base in the party membership or the unions,
and are not even particularly strong within the Parliamentary Labour Party. But
they have the closest links to the media of any faction (especially the BBC and
Guardian Media Group). They also include the MPs from the 2010 intake who
received the most positive press coverage during the period 2010-5, and who
therefore believed themselves to be in contention for the party leadership once
the Corbyn project collapsed. They confidently expected this collapse to occur
immediately after the 2017 election. It didn’t. So unless something very
unexpected indeed happens, none of them is now ever likely to become Prime
Minister.

This
fact has been apparent for less than a year. It is therefore unsurprising that
most of these MPs and their immediate hangers-on - including their friends in
the press - have not come to terms with it, or with the extent to which the
political world now looks very different from how they always assumed that it
was always going to look. It is also true that the most rational response to
their situation would probably be to try to form a new party. Such a party
would never form a government, but it would at least not force the Blairites to
accept the leadership of the radical Labour left, whom they detest more than
they do almost any other political tendency (in any party).

We
all know the systemic obstacles to such a new party having any success under
our electoral system, and there is no reason for thinking that such a party could
take any seats from Labour at a general election. But if the Tories implode
over Brexit, might such a party be able to pick up a few Conservative-held
seats in affluent, pro-Remain areas: enough to provide a life-raft for the 20
or so most anti-Corbynite Labour MPs, as well as Tory allies like Anna Soubry?
As tricky as it could be, there’s some
psephological evidence that it might, and no
shortage of offers of funding.

But
the Blairites have a more fundamental problem than their lack of support among
the public or the weakness of their political position. It is in fact an
existential problem: what are they for? Why do they exist at all?

Before
July 2017, they all seemed to firmly believe that it was simply not possible
for a Labour Party led from the left to do well at an election. They therefore
never really needed to ask themselves what their politics actually were, whose
interests they actually served, or why they did what they did. They believed
that the difference between them and even the most radical left-winger was not
really one of ideology - we all want to change the world, after all - but one
of pragmatism and political competence.

The
Blairites were the people, or so they seemed to think, who understood the
limits of achievable reform in our epoch, who understood that what the left
calls ‘neoliberalism’ was simply the way the world works in the 21st century.
They were unencumbered by nostalgia for the 1945 welfare-state settlement.
So they were able to propose types of social reform that might actually have a
chance of winning elections, and of not alienating business interests, and
therefore of actually being implemented. Immediately to their left in the
Labour Party, the members of ‘soft left’ tradition represented by Ed Miliband
more or less agreed with this assessment, although they always suspected that
Blair and his followers had gone further than strictly necessary in embracing a
neoliberal agenda, and that an embrace of it was regrettable, if largely unavoidable.

The
June 2017 election result has scuppered this idea. So a significant section of
the soft left, among the membership and the parliamentary party, have now
abandoned the Blairites and more-or-less enthusiastically embraced Corbyn’s
leadership (including many who supported Owen Smith’s leadership challenge in
2016). This leaves the Blairites isolated, and forced to ask themselves what
exactly they do stand for; if it is not, after all, true that their agenda is
the most left-wing one that ever had a hope of being implemented.

The
answer they have come up with is more less the same as that of the Clinton
Democrats. The true-believers in both camps still tell themselves that the
progressive outcomes of Bill Clinton’s, New Labour’s and Obama’s terms of
office counterbalanced the less progressive outcomes. But the fact is that
during those periods, inequality continued to rise while the overweening power
of finance capital wasn’t seriously checked at all, and everyone can see the
consequences. As a result, large sections of the left-leaning public in both
countries don’t share their positive assessment.

Under
these circumstance, the only claim to progressiveness that these centrists can credibly
make lies in their sustained commitments to social liberalism, open borders and
cosmopolitan culture. They may have let the City and Wall Street run riot over
the culture, trashing what remained of the post-war settlement and taking
inequality back to late-nineteenth-century levels. But at least they didn’t
demonise immigrants, single mothers or gay people.

Of
course the problem here is that historically, if you wanted to ally yourself
with forces that have been internationalist, anti-racist, pro-feminist and
pro-queer, then you would be more likely to have thrown in your lot with the
radical left than with the liberal ‘centre’ and its technocratic leaders. This
fact must be fiercely disavowed if the belief in the progressive
character of the Third Way is to be in any way sustainable. So painting the
left as, contrary to all real historical experience, in some way more
prone than they are to misogyny, racism, or even forms of nationalism becomes
essential to the discourse of these neoliberal centrists. It is the only way
that they can sustain the fantasy of their progressiveness: if only in their
own minds.

The
result is a narrative according to which the Blairites’ commitments to
globalisation, financial deregulation and their inevitable cultural
concomitants somehow makes them heirs to the progressive tradition of Martin
Luther King and Sylvia Pankhurst; whereas everyone to their left is a
proto-Stalinist, and probably an anti-Semite. Obviously the politics of Brexit
lends all of this a new urgency. The hardcore Remainers are able to tell
themselves a story according to which they are the heroes, making a last
courageous stand against the ‘forces of conservatism’, defending open
borders, open culture, feminism and multiculturalism before the Stalinists and
Ukippers conspire to plunge the world into darkness.

If
this is a story that you are trying to tell yourself, then believing that your
opponents are anti-Semitic (or at least pretending that you believe it) is very
convenient indeed. Antisemitism has
traditionally often been couched in terms of hostility to cosmopolitanism in
general. A key figure of anti-Semitic discourse at the turn of the 20th century
was the ‘wandering Jew’, the ultimate ‘rootless cosmpolitan’. The basic claim
of the Blairites has always been that enacting a policy agenda that turned us
all into rootless cosmopolitans, whether we want to be or not - is in fact
liberatory and progressive. This is exactly
what the Leave vote was a protest against. So if you are a Blairite who is
in total denial about the extent to which your own policy agenda helped to
produce the Brexit reaction, and who thinks that Corbyn’s supporters are all
reactionary populists - mindless thugs motivated by resentment and intent on
some hideous revenge - then on some level you almost have to believe
that they are probably also anti-Semitic (if only in some elusive,
structural or institutional way).

At
that stage, you might even be forced to face up to the fact that your policy
agenda was never actually motivated by a proud belief in cosmopolitan
liberalism at all, given that its long-term effect was to undermine support for
British EU membership. Having arrived at that realisation, it might become
apparent that New Labour’s rhetorical embrace of openness and multiculturalism
was in fact a convenient
justification for a programme that was overwhelmingly determined by the
interests of finance capital. And facing up to all that is the very last thing that the Blairites, or their supporters at The
Observer, want to do.

And this
is not the only motivation for the Blairites embracing the Corbyn-as-anti-Semite
narrative. The other is that despite their hypothetical commitment to the EU,
Atlanticism has always trumped Europhilia in determining their attitudes to
foreign policy. And being a good servant of the US has always meant endorsing
America’s position on Israel, which means de facto accepting the Israeli
nationalist justification for the occupation of the occupied territories and
the treatment of the Palestinian people. It is really impossible to accept any
of that without embracing the broader narrative according to which Israel is an
oasis of democracy in the Middle East, to be supported at all costs against all
of her enemies, and that anyone who disagrees with this view can only do so
because they are secretly hostile to liberal democracy as such, or to Jews, or
to both.

The old right

The other main
tradition on the Labour right is the traditional, non-Blairite
tendency that traces its roots back to the debates between the left and right
of the parties as far back as the 1940s. Let’s call them the old right.
Organised primarily by Labour First,
this tendency has a more extensive network of supporters in the trade unions,
the party bureaucracy, local councillor networks and the grassroots membership
than do Progress and the Blairites.

It is
this network that was being routinely used to try to formally exclude
Corbynites from the party until just a few weeks ago, when a string of
resignations of senior party bureaucrats - including General
Secretary Ian McNicol - marked the effective surrender of the right at the
level of the national party organisation. The old right remains organised,
active, and thoroughly hostile to Corbyn and Momentum at constituency
and regional level in many places. But there will be no more suspensions of
party members simply because they support Corbyn and the party machinery think
they can get away with suspending them. Notably, Tom Watson, the old right’s
main figurehead and most powerful member, has already signalled to his own
supporters that following the June 2017 election result, he regards
any further attempts to undermine Corbyn’s leadership as futile for the
foreseeable future.

The
old right therefore find themselves in a peculiar situation. Like the
Blairites, the June 2017 election result presents them with something of an
existential conundrum. Also like the Blairites (well like everybody, to be
fair), the old right have a distinctive theory of history. The New Labour view
of history is linear - Blair and his followers still think of themselves as
leading the charge into the future, sweeping before them all obstacles to
progress (ie to neoliberalism and globalisation), except when ugly populists
get in their way.

But
the old right theory of history is cyclical. They believe that every time a Labour government has lost an election, the party has swung to the left as its members expressed
frustration with the inevitably limited nature of the reforms that the outgoing
government was able to make. According to this narrative, such swings to the
left inevitably lead the party into electoral oblivion, and it is always up to
them, the dogged soldiers of moderation, ultimately to save the party and bring
it back to power. This is what they think happened in
both the 1951-64 period and 1979-97. Until the 2017 election, they
were quite sure that history was repeating itself again. The fact that it
obviously isn’t is more than a little disconcerting for them.

They
have different explanations for what is going on. Some of them think that the
Tories performed so badly in June that Labour should have won by a landslide,
and Labour under Corbyn will never improve on that result. But this isn’t a
very easy position to sustain if you claim to be a hard-headed realist with one
eye always on the historic precedents. No party has ever achieved a swing such
as would have been needed to form a Labour government in June 2017, and few
oppositions have made gains on the scale that Labour did then, without then
going on to form the next government.

Some
of the old right have convinced themselves that in fact they supported Corbyn
all along, and are merely organised in opposition to the dangerous subversives
of Momentum, and to Corbyn’s cabal of unwise counsellors (Seamus Milne,
Andrew Murray), etc. Many of them seem to be fixated on the mythical
deselection threats to their own local MPs and the defence of said MPs from
those threats: an obvious displacement activity, preventing them from having to
ask themselves why they are even bothering to organise against Momentum now
that Momentum has turned out to be better than they are at winning
elections for Labour.

In
fact what most of them are preoccupied with is defending their own jobs and
positions- and those of their friends - as local councillors and party
bureaucrats, rightly judging that in many cases, there are Corbyn supporters
who would be willing to displace them. But the fact that their motives are so
self-interested would be an uncomfortable truth for most of these people to
have to admit to themselves, given that they are also, mostly - unlike most
Blairites - good-hearted and dedicated servants of the Labour cause, rather
than merely opportunistic careerists. So in finding an ideological
justification for their continued hostility to Corbynism, most of them have
taken the most obvious route open to them. They have increasingly fixated on
the one point of actual ideological difference between themselves and the
Corbynites: foreign policy.

This
is a point about the old right that is often very poorly understood by Labour
members to their left: their commitment to NATO, the nuclear deterrent and
Israel is deep, heartfelt, ideological and goes back to the post-war moment.
Theirs is a mentality and world-view born in the first years of the cold war.
As I often like to point out, it arose at the moment when the cold war was a
matter of rivalry between a United States led by the New Deal administration,
and a USSR led by Stalin. This wasn’t the cold war of Gorbachev vs Thatcher
that still informs the imagination of much of the radical left. From this
perspective, it is easy to see how a commitment to liberal democracy and
‘western values’, even to unswerving Atlanticism, could seem to be consistent
with a commitment to gradualist social democracy at home and enmity to tyrants
all around the world.

This
was also a historical moment when the overwhelming consensus amongst the
international left was pro-Israel, and political forces allied to the left were
hegemonic within Israel itself. It’s easy to see why many on the Labour right concluded
that the pro-Russian, Communist-fellow-traveller left was a threat not just to
liberal democracy but to enlightened socialism itself. It’s also easy to see
why Israel would inspire real loyalty amongst the same constituency. What’s
more of a mystery is how this mentality survived the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and
1990s. But the fact is that it did, providing the rationale for that section of the left
that supported the Iraq war (as a war against tyranny and against an enemy
of Israel) in the early 2000s, and is still providing the rationale for those
who think that attacking Corbyn for his supposed pro-Putin sympathies is
somehow an urgent moral duty.

All
of this produces a situation in which being pro-Israel, and being willing to
believe that anyone to your left is an enemy of liberal democracy and a covert
supporter of tyrants, is pretty much the only thing that the old right and the
Blairites have in common. The old right have never been cosmopolitan, have
included in their number a fair few Eurosceptics, and have never shown much
interest in social liberalism (their last Prime Minister, James Callaghan, was
a clear enemy of the ‘permissive society’). They were never that keen on the
marketisation of public services or the Private Finance Initiative. In fact
there is nothing in their history to suggest any good reason for them opposing
any element of Corbyn’s domestic agenda. As such, one really has to wonder if
the old right has much future as a political formation at all.

For
those among its leaders and key organisers who are desperate to keep it alive,
there is nowhere else for them to go except to keep attacking Corbyn on foreign
policy. But an aggressively and explicitly pro-Israel, pro-Atlanticist policy
agenda is going to be very difficult to sell to any section of the British left
today, even among centrist liberals. So
it is only by claiming that somehow Corbyn’s foreign policy agenda is
implicated in his supposed wider sympathy for (or, at least toleration of)
authoritarian and illiberal tendencies within the party, that they are likely
to be able to win any support for their positions at all.

This
is why I do not think that there is much that the leaderships of Momentum
or Labour can do to slow down the onslaught of accusations against Corbyn and
against his supporters. There may well be real antisemitism and
unconscious racism in some sections of the party, and if there is then there is
every reason to work against it. But that is not why the Blairites and the old
right have been pushing this line. They have been pushing it because in fact it
is one of the few issues on which they can authentically converge, allowing
them both to claim the mantle of liberal cosmopolitan progressiveness and to
paint their opponents as illiberal reactionaries, while acting in a way which
is persistently calculated to attract the sympathy of the pro-Israel lobby, and
the funding that it has traditionally bestowed upon politicians that it likes.

How to respond?

The
question all this leaves open of course, is how the left ought to respond. One
response has been to declare our commitment to rooting out antisemitism while acknowledging that the attacks on Corbyn have been
opportunistic. This is fine so far as it goes. But it remains reactive in
nature, addressing an immediate issue, and the tone of the response so far has
been authoritarian, promising a programme of re-education to root out ‘unconscious
bias’. I’m
all for consciousness-raising; but assuming the authority to tell other
people what’s going on in their unconscious is always a dangerous business.
(Granted, much of this article has consisted of speculation as to what’s going
on in the unconscious of various sections of the Labour right, so perhaps I
shouldn’t push this argument too far).

This
authoritarian tone has been typical of Labour pronouncements on social issues
in recent years, with a tendency to emphasise what we are against. We are
against racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia and antisemitism. But what
are we for?

Labour
needs a positive vision. Such a vision
would not only borrow from the language of liberal identity politics, promising
to enforce it more rigorously than the right. It would also seek to connect
Corbyn’s Labour with the history and the values of the movements that began the
fight against those forms of oppression: women’s liberation, gay liberation,
civil rights, black power, etc. Those movements were not just against things: they were animated by a
vision of human freedom and self-organisation that exceeded the limits imposed
on them by patriarchy, colonialism and capitalism.

At
the moment of Brexit, it is more crucial than ever for the radical left to
assert its commitments to internationalism and cosmopolitanism, while stressing
the differences between our cosmopolitanism and that of the neoliberal
centrists. We believe in a society in which cultural differences are neither
suppressed nor imposed, but become the basis for a productive and creative
expression of human potential. There can be no room for antisemitism in such a society. And nor can there can be any question of
allowing finance capital to continue to organise social life to its own
advantage.

Cosmopolitan class consciousness

This
is a crucial point to take on, because there can be little doubt as to what the
next stage of the right-wing attempt to weaponise antisemitism and claim the mantle of cosmopolitanism will be. A couple of weeks
ago, I remarked to my partner that I thought the next stage would see the
right-wing attempting to claim that any criticism of finance capital in
general - any reference to ‘parasites’ or ‘greedy bankers’ - should be
characterised as implicitly anti-Semitic. It is certainly true that
anti-Semites have often tried to win support by eliding mistrust of financiers,
speculators and rentiers with hatred of Jews. This doesn’t mean we should deny
the fact that financiers, speculators and rentiers deliberately exert influence
when they can, to maximise their own interests at the expense of others. Quite
the opposite: it means that we should stress very strongly that the problem
with capitalists is their complicity with capitalism, and not their religious
or ethnic identity.

But
at least one recent contribution to the debate has indeed already put forward
the view that any form of political discourse that
‘personalises’ the analysis of capitalism is always-already complicity with
anti-Semitic discourse. This analysis seems to suggest that any view of
capitalism that takes account of any form of agency or interests being at work
in any situation is inherently ‘conspiratorial’ in nature, and hence guilty of
the crimes of both populism (assumed to be a bad thing) and implicit antisemitism.

This
is a fallacious argument on two counts. On the one hand it amounts to a mere
argument from resemblance: because anti-capitalist discourse and anti-Semitic
discourse share some structural features, they are fundamentally the same. This
type of argument has been recognised as a logical fallacy for millennia.

On
the other hand this argument fundamentally misunderstands how ideology
functions and what the purpose of ideology-critique is. Ideology very rarely
creates a picture of the world that bears no resemblance to reality. It is far
more effective when it presents a picture that is close enough to reality to
resonate with the lived experience of the people that it is trying to convince,
while distorting key elements of that reality to protect the interests of the
powerful. Under such circumstances, the role of critical analysis is not to
identify and fetishise the formal similarities between different discourses -
it is to identify the differences between them, however small they may appear,
in order to reveal the power relationships at work in the distortions that they
produce, and to identify those that are closer to and further from the truth.

The
role of critical intellectuals is not to denounce anti-capitalism because it
structurally resembles antisemitism. It is to
differentiate the one from the other and to help others to make the same
differentiation. Our task is to unmask the fact that the fundamental purpose of
antisemitism is always to cover up the truth of power relations, driving wedges
between Jewish and non-Jewish communities who should be united in the assertion
of their common collective interests.

In
the end what this comes down to is a rather banal and predictable observation:
but one that radicals will need to keep making no doubt for many years to come.
It is that the best cure for antisemitism is not just
re-education or disciplinary hearings. It is the positive raising of class
consciousness. The more people are enabled to understand the extent to which
disparities of wealth and power are what really shape political and social
outcomes in the world, the more they are enabled to realise the extent to which
they share material interests with millions of others around the world -
irrespective of ethnicity or religion - the less susceptible they will be to antisemitism, conspiracy theory, or racism of any kind. This is the response
that centrist liberalism cannot make, which is why its response to antisemitism can never be adequate to its task.

About the author

Jeremy Gilbert is Professor of Cultural and Political Theory, a writer, researcher and activist based
at the University
of East London. His most
recent book is Common
Ground. See jeremygilbert.org for
more information, or follow @jemgilbert.

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